Enlighten us with your ideas for inexpensive and straightforward improvements to road safety please. To put them in context it would be useful to know how and how often you use roads.
Thanks for your interest, I'd like to think it was genuine and not simply in order to take up a contrary position to mine. However I do wonder why you find it necessary to ask how often I use roads? Let's just say I drive several times a week, I also have a lot of experience as a cyclist, and I've spent much of a career in local authorities and consultancies addressing complaints about people's driving (and parking).
So let me ask you, how often do you use roads and what experience do you have? Are you aware that of the 1500 or so road deaths every single year, plus many thousands more serious injuries, most are caused by driving without due care, with mainly avoidable faults like driving too close to the vehicle in front? The vast majority of drivers habitually drive too close to the vehicle in front, as you can see on most roads every day, yet almost nothing is done with the vast amounts of technology available to address this, and even less is done to enforce against it, despite (for example) the presence of huge numbers of motorway cameras which can already detect those drivers causing the risks.
Next, ask yourself how many qualifications in life are re-assessed, observed, re-examined etc. on a regular basis, whether or not the holder of the qualification has failed in something. But the holder of a driving licence, how often is their qualification re-examined, even after they have demonstrably proved incompetent by causing a bump, or an injury, or even worse?
I could go on, but people just switch off when driving is challenged, merrily putting things into the "too difficult" box, or fearing political unpopularity. Killing and injuring thousands of people is widely regarded as an acceptable part of life on the roads, when anywhere else it would be viewed with absolute horror. If that wasn't true, then a lot more would be done about it.
I've hardly started on what could be done, but alas I don't believe there's much genuine interest in addressing the problems of bad driving, which can be seen on most roads, most minutes of every single day. So tell me, how much genuine interest do you have?
A lot has been done behind the scenes, otherwise we'd not have seen crashes result in a fall of annual road deaths from about 3,600 in the 1990's (about 10 a day) to about 1,800 now (about 5 per day), even though traffic volumes have risen by about 1/3.
Things like Road Safety Audits, crash testing results being part of the sales of new cars, crash testing getting more stringent, and so on.
Yes there's more that could be done, and often some of the more in your face stuff (cycle lanes, LTN, HS2, bus lanes, rail enhancements, etc.) does get a lot of pushback.
These things generally only deal with the symptoms, not the cause, ie poor quality and unsafe driving. See my other comments.